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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

First Fight

Okay. This seemed like a fun blogfest to join because we all enjoy a good fight and a good kiss. The First Fight, First Kiss Blogfest is hosted by Jackie at Bouquet of Books and Dani at Entertaining Interests.

I decided to take my scenes from a novel MS that I need to edit further, but I'm taking a break on it for now to work on other projects. Sharing parts of it will, I hope, get me some useful commentary that will help me polish these scenes later on.

A little background. This novel is set on a colony world known as Terra Minor. Our people share this planet with a secretive people known as the Kentari. The Kentari have a variety of abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, and healing powers. Unfortunately, they need to keep these abilities secret from most of our people out of fear of retaliation. And right now, anti-alien sentiments have escalated racial tensions enough that anything could bring things to the tipping point.

Gretchen Taylor knows about these abilities and is training with Quirin, a Kentari, to use them. Their relationship is loaded with complications, especially since her own parents are racist and would never forgive her if they found out about this.

The fight scene here is a riot instigated by one of the problematic racist organizations. Gretchen, knowing Quirin would be in danger, runs through the danger to find him. The scene starts when she locates him. Getting away from the chaos won't be as simple as they'd hoped.

Before they got
a chance to move, the chaos from the main road began to spill into the sanctuary
of the side street. A wave of frantic
bodies began to flow around them, and the screaming seemed to fill the
world. A motion-blurred body crashed
between Gretchen and Quirin, knocking them apart. She barely managed to maintain her balance,
and a high-pitched agonized cry invaded her senses. Looking back toward the
main road, the sight that presented itself nearly made her ill. She couldn’t identify the body in any way
(all distinctions such as sex and species had been obliterated), but the flames
that were so effective against the local businesses had consumed the living
flesh rapidly. A group of masked
individuals stood in a circle around the burning remains, throwing whatever
assorted objects they could in a display of contempt. It wasn’t enough for these people to kill
them. They also felt a need to inflict
whatever final humiliation they could.

Gretchen forced herself to look away
when she felt a rising sense of panic bubble up within her. It broke through her disgust, forcing its way
to the front of her awareness. Despite
her tumultuous feelings, she knew this particular emotion did not belong to
her. And that’s when she realized she
didn’t know where Quirin was. Casting
her eyes desperately around the deteriorating scene, she finally located
him. She immediately felt a resurgence
of every negative emotion she’d had over the last several minutes.

He stood several
meters away, trapped against the side of a burning building. A terrified young Kentari girl, who was soaked
in her own blood, huddled in his arms.
She couldn’t have been more than a few years old. He must have gone to rescue her, and a
segment of the Terran mob closed in around them. The story about the Kentari girl that had
been killed came back to Gretchen then, and she felt like she was sinking into
the ground. That incident was about to
repeat itself. One of the masked
attackers held in hand a deadly firebomb, and she had no doubt they fully
intended to use it. Quirin and the
little girl didn’t have much time.

Her entire world froze. Nothing else seemed important. A crucial moment had come. Though she’d already been seen in public with
Quirin, the actions she now considered would irreversibly delineate her
loyalties. The potential damage they
could inflict on her already unstable life were numerous, provided particular
people became aware of them, which seemed entirely possible. But somehow all that didn’t seem to matter
anymore.

No.
She wouldn’t let it happen. She
couldn’t. He knew how to defend himself,
though the sheer number of them may have rendered his efforts ineffective, but
the act of trying to escape with the most potent means available to him would
mean jeopardizing his entire race. She
cared too much to let him be in the position to choose. In record time, she whipped out her
hoverboard and readied it for flight.
The board had already begun to move forward as she leapt on for the ride
of her life. Gretchen headed into the
crowd at high speed, purposely grazing the person poised to hurl the
firebomb. They went flying, and the
deadly incendiary device hit the ground several meters back, bursting into
flames in an empty part of the street.
Then she brought the board to a jolting halt (if it weren’t for her
special-grip shoes, she would have been thrown off) in between Quirin and the
rest of the crowd, which seemed too stunned to react right away. She frantically gestured to him. “Come on!”

There was no time to fully express
all he felt upon seeing her, but that could wait until later. He clutched the girl tightly in one arm and
jumped aboard, wrapping his free arm around Gretchen’s waist for support. Once he was in place with the frightened
child uncomfortably but safely sandwiched between them, Gretchen called back,
“Hold on tight. This is going to be a
rough ride.” A fraction of a second
later, she gunned it and they were hurtling away from the madness at a terrifying
speed. Quirin was forced to hold onto
Gretchen’s waist so tightly he feared he was hurting her, and the little girl held
on to Quirin with such strength that she was leaving marks on him, but none of
that mattered. The fact that they were
rapidly moving away from the angry crowd mattered. The severity of the little girl’s injuries
also mattered. She’d been brutally
punched, kicked, beaten, and pelted with everything her attackers could
find. When he first saw her, she was
hurt too badly to get back on her feet.
As he held her now, he sensed that she had several broken bones and a
lot more damage that he wasn’t certain he could repair by himself. He whispered softly to her soothing Kentari
phrases that Gretchen couldn’t understand, but she felt the tenderness with
which he uttered them. The little girl
began to relax as he gently allowed some of his energy to flow over to her and
begin healing the damage that had been done.

Thanks for reading. I know it needs some work, so feel free to leave your honest opinions. I can't wait to post the First Kiss on Thursday!

13 comments:

I agree with Laura, it is a great scene. However, I think it needs some dialogue. It's just too much text to sort through easily. If the narrator doesn't want to speak, have her hear snippets or shouts from unknowns to illustrate the violence taking place. That is the only suggestion that I could think of.

I was drawn into this excerpt very easily, without feeling the need for more dialogue. Given the circumstances, there isn't really much to say, as the situation is unfolding internally for the MC. A few shouts from the crowd, as another suggested, my help break up the sequences, but only if you feel comfortable doing so. I think this is a wonderfully captivating draft, so it's hard to offer up suggestions for editing. The only thing (which is very minor) that I noticed was that you used phrasing around the word "matters" several times... as in what matters or nothing matters. You might want to change up the terminology a bit while still getting the same point across. I hope that is helpful. Back to the praise though... I honestly cannot wait to come back and read more on Thursday. This concept based around futuristic racism is gripping material and I would love to read the story in its entirety!